Elizabeth Gaskell and Manchester:
Identity, Culture and the Modern City
Conference, 19/20/21 July 2005

Modern readers of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë have frequently lamented the biographer’s apparent preoccupation with Brontë the dutiful woman at the expense of Brontë the literary artist. A variety of explanations have been advanced to explain Gaskell’s focus on female duty in the work, ranging from her alleged lack of interest in Brontë’s creative process to her actual squeamishness about the propriety of Brontë’s fiction.

In this presentation, I suggest instead that the shaping force behind Gaskell’s biography was her own cosmopolitan, urban background, which dominated her perception of Brontë from the very beginning of their relationship and made Brontë’s rural life of social isolation profoundly fascinating to her. “Such a life as Miss B’s I never heard of before,” she wrote to Catherine Winkworth after her first meeting with Brontë in August 1850. “Lady K[ay] S[huttleworth] described her home to me as in a village of a few grey stone houses perched up on the north side of a bleak moor--looking over sweeps of bleak moors.” “Indeed I never heard of so hard, and dreary a life,” she writes to another correspondent at the same time. “She is truth itself . . . which has never been called out by anything kind or genial.”

Gaskell’s involvement in the cause of the urban working class, her network of literary associations, her intense family life, and her unusual financial independence made Brontë’s life seem almost inconceivable to her and inexorably drew her, I argue, to the human elements of the Brontë story when she set about writing her friend’s life. But this is not to say that Gaskell ignores Brontë the artist in her biography. Rather, I suggest, the gaping chasm that Gaskell perceived between Brontë’s dreary existence and her own busy city life plays itself out in the biography in Gaskell’s persistent efforts to enlist her readers in seeing Brontë’s literary accomplishments, set as they were against a life of almost unmitigated loneliness and sorrow, as a grand and heroic achievement.

Department of English
DePaul University
Chicago, IL 60614 USA
gmulderi@depaul.edu